A Different War

By Craig Thomas

A test flight goes down and suspicions of corruption are raised in this “high-octane thriller” from the New York Times–bestselling author of Firefox (Daily Express).
 
When a new American airliner crashes on its final test flight, ex-military pilot Mitchell Gant—whose former father-in-law is the CEO of the aircraft company—is called in to investigate, and sets out on the dangerous task of trying to recreate the fatal malfunction in the Arizona desert.
 
Meanwhile in Britain, Marian Pyott is looking into a massive fraud case involving business, politics, and the global marketplace. And soon, Gant’s and Pyott’s paths find their paths crossing in this tale of action, suspense, and international intrigue from the author “widely regarded as the creator of the ‘techno-thriller’ ” (Wales Online).

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781504083935

Craig Thomas

Cardiff-born, internationally bestselling author Craig Thomas (1942–2011) wrote eighteen novels between 1976 and 1998. His first novel, Rat Trap, was published in 1976, swiftly followed by the international bestseller, Firefox. It was after the success of this book that he left his job as an English teacher and became a full-time novelist. Thomas went on to write sixteen further novels, including three featuring the Firefox pilot, Mitchell Gant: Firefox Down, Winter Hawk and A Different War. Firefox attracted the attention of Hollywood and in 1982 was made into a film starring and directed by Clint Eastwood. The novel is credited with inventing the techno-thriller genre.

Book preview

A Different War

A Mitchell Gant Novel

Craig Thomas

Laisser-faire, in short, should be the general practice: every departure from it, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil …

… as a general rule, the business of life is better performed when those who have an immediate interest in it are left to their own course, uncontrolled either by the mandate of the law or by the meddling of any public functionary.

John Stuart Mill,

Principles of Political Economy, V, IX (Originally published in 1848)

CHARACTERS

Aubrey, Sir Kenneth de Vere: Retired former Director-General of British Secret Intelligence Service

Banks, Ray: Construction company owner

Blakey, Ron: Engineer, Vance Aircraft

Bill Marian: Pyott’s party agent

Bressier, Jean-Paul: CEO Balzac-Stendhal

Burton, Charlotte: Wife of Tim Burton

Burton, Tim: Owner, Artemis Airlines

Campbell, Ben: MEP (Minister of the European Parliament)

Cobb: Employed on surveillance & other duties by Jessop

Coulthard, Sir Bryan: CEO Aero UK

Fraser: Employee of David Winterborne; former British Intelligence operative

Egan, Sam: Owner, Egan Construction

Grey, Mrs: Kenneth Aubrey’s housekeeper

Gant, Major Mitchell: NTSB investigator, pilot

Halvesson: Security guard at Oslo airport

Hollis, Pat: Pilot, Vance Aircraft

Jessop: Former British Intelligence operative employed on surveillance and other duties by Fraser

Jorgensen: Engineer for maintenance company working for Vance Aircraft

Laxton: EU Commissioner for Urban Development

Lloyd, Michael: Senior researcher and aide to the EC Commissioner for Transport

McIntyre, Jack: FBI officer

Olssen: Chief Engineer, maintenance company contracted to Vance Aircraft

Pierstone, Jack: Deputy Director of the NTSB

Pyott, General Sir Giles: Retired army officer, friend and former colleague of Kenneth Aubrey

Pyott, Marian MP: UK Minister of Parliament, daughter of Giles Pyott

Rogier, Etienne: EU Commissioner for Transport

Rousillon, Michel: French counter-intelligence officer

St Cloud, Edouard: French counter-intelligence officer

Strickland: Professional hitman, sabotage expert

Winterborne, Sir Clive: Friend of Kenneth Aubrey, father of David Winterborne

Winterborne, David: Chair and CEO of Winterborne Holdings, major shareholder in Aero UK

Vance, Alan: Owner of Vance Aircraft

Vance, Barbara: Daughter of Alan Vance, Executive V-P in charge of Corporate Affairs at Vance Aircraft; former wife of Mitchell Gant

PRELUDE

1ST April, 199–

All Fools’ Day. The markets had been telling him that—laughing at him, in effect—ever since they had opened that morning. The share prices, the snippets of information, the rumours, the heavy selling, the nervousness of the banks … Like the chuckling of people at a joke at his expense.

Twenty million dollars had been wiped off the asset value of Winterborne Holdings in a matter of hours. Wall Street, open an hour earlier, had caught the infection and the stock of the US subsidiaries was sliding downwards in price. It could be fifty million dollars by the day’s end. All Fools’ Day.

In enraged frustration, David Winterborne stood up and walked to one of the full-length windows of the first-floor drawing room which overlooked Eaton Square. The London traffic filtered politely through the square; sunlight was dappled in the gardens. There were a few well-dressed pedestrians enjoying the spring sunshine. The scene appeared painted, formal, like a landscape he had commissioned to celebrate ownership. Yet, as if in the moment of an earth tremor, the whole vista of wealth, exclusivity and decorousness was rendered shimmeringly unreal by the shocks of a threatened financial disaster.

Fraser, who remained seated on the sofa behind him, was just another of those bringing the bad news, a functionary reporting that the Oracle hadn’t found in his favour. One long-fingered hand smoothed his orientally straight black hair—but he realised that even Fraser, a mere employee, would see that the gesture was entirely pretence. He turned to face the room, catching sight of his slim figure in a mirror above the Adam fireplace. His Jermyn Street shirt was crumpled, his tie askew. His Eurasian features appeared unhabitually thunderous, stubbornly defiant.

He had spent millions of his own trying to block the hole in the dyke. To little or no effect …

‘I may have to base decisions—important ones—on your assessment, Fraser. Are you certain?’

Fraser shrugged, a moneylender’s gesture.

‘I—look, sir, this is good inside information. Possibly the best. MoD Procurement and the Treasury are digging in for a very bloody campaign.’ Fraser’s Scot’s accent came and went, like the sophistication of his vocabulary, in the manner of a weak, intermittent radio signal. ‘The Treasury is twisting the DTI’s arm up behind its back not to support the European helicopter, but to side with them over the American machine.’ His mouth distorted in a congenital contempt. ‘It’s cheaper than ours—yours.’

‘It’s not mine—’ Winterborne began angrily. But it was, wasn’t it? That was the whole problem. Winterborne Holdings in the UK had become far too close—symbiotic, they said—to Aero UK, senior manufacturing partner in the European consortium building the helicopter the British army was supposed to buy. ‘You must be mistaken—your sources are misguided. The government just couldn’t do it …’ Fraser’s expression remained dourly cynical. Winterborne turned away.

The government—the damned Tory government who had seen almost a quarter of a million of his money to help their last election campaign—would do it, if it suited. ‘It would be the finish of a great many companies. The unemployment would be embarrassing … It would—could—be the end of Aero UK.’ He was speaking to the painted, formal scene beyond the window. He felt he was staring at the family estates, watching for the small army of bailiff’s men who would soon be coming up the drive to dispossess him. Then, to Fraser: ‘You’re sure?’ He cupped his narrow chin with one hand, adding: ‘Is it no longer a simple matter of more money—?’

‘We can’t buy influence at that level. It’s in the hands of the grown-ups, not the greedy kids. Aero UK’s board and you could wrap yourselves in the flag, talk about job losses … It might work.’

‘But you don’t believe it. When do they decide between Eurocopter and the American rival?’

‘Some time in the next two months—before the end of May.’ David Winterborne turned to face Fraser.

‘They will do it?’ Fraser nodded.

‘That’s the betting. That the Treasury will force MoD to buy American because of the relative costs.’

‘So, Winterborne Holdings has a huge stake in Aero UK, in a dozen wholly owned subcontracting companies, in various other offshoots … While already Aero UK has a new airliner no one in the world wants to buy! And a Eurodefender fighter project that’s almost four years behind schedule in the development phase alone. Now Aero UK will lose the helicopter project, too—worth at least two hundred and fifty million sterling! Have I left anything out?’

Fraser suppressed a grin and shook his head. ‘No, sir. Nothing.’

In the gardens, small dogs were barking around young children and nannies. It was all so bloodily—mockingly—normal, a flattering image of the world he had bought for himself.

Which was now threatened. Cash-starved because of Aero UK, and even more because of his involvement in the urban regeneration project in the Midlands, his largest investment outside the US. His borrowing was at a record high, his profit at a ten-year low. He had lost twenty million because of a couple of hostile newspaper articles over the weekend and a follow-up in The Times. Just because of that damned unsellable airliner alone—! When all the other skeletons tumbled from the cupboards, Winterborne Holdings would be finished.

‘It has to be stopped—the rot,’ he announced.

‘Sorry—sir?’

He turned to Fraser. His decision, which had leapt out of the dark at the back of his mind, shocked and thrilled like a sudden, unanticipated sexual encounter.

‘I’m propping up the share prices and it’s costing me a very great deal. That must cease.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Fraser appeared unsettled, as if he were about to be accused of not supplying a solution to the situation. He was like a hamster trying to get further into its straw. Perhaps he sensed what was coming …

‘I need someone. Someone you would know, your kind of person.’

‘To do what, sir?’

‘Help me to sell airliners—since Aero UK has singularly failed to do just that. I need someone who can help me deal with that mess.’

He moved towards the sofa, plucking that morning’s Times from the arm of a chair and dropping it into Fraser’s lap. The business section was folded open at one of its inside pages. The fateful follow-up to the weekend articles on Skyliner and Aero UK that had cost him so much. There were two photographs, side by side. One displayed the bulk of the Skyliner that no one wanted to buy, looking like the profile of a winged dolphin. The other was of an American airliner—the new Vance 494 long-haul. It, like the US helicopter soon also to become his bane, was cheap. Much cheaper than Skyliner to buy, lease, operate. Those carriers not waiting for the new Boeing were poised to buy it, once its early commercial flights were successful.

Potential Skyliner purchasers would soon be queueing to buy the Vance aircraft.

Fraser looked up at him ruminatively, doubtful of the reality of his inference. Then his expression became carefully, patiently neutral.

‘Find someone—someone who can do something … about that.’ Vance 494—the airliner of the future, the caption beneath the photograph read. Underneath that of the Skyliner were the words, Euro-boast—any future at all?

‘I—think I understand, sir. I’ll bring you some names, a scenario—tomorrow?’

‘Tonight.’

‘Sir.’

He heard the doors of the drawing room close behind Fraser. There seemed a finality to the sound, as if he had closed the doors on some other kind of space. Scruples? he mocked himself. But he sensed that some sort of Rubicon had been crossed, just by intimating this design to Fraser. Very well, he had made no final decision, he could always rethink, withdraw …

And yet he was almost certain he would not change his mind, retreat from the place where he suddenly found himself. He reached out and pressed the bell on his desk. Coffee, which he had not offered Fraser, appealed. He glanced at his watch and realised he had forgotten that he had promised to accompany Marian to Covent Garden that evening, for the revival of Dowell’s production of Sleeping Beauty—with the magnificent Maria Bjornson sets. He would have to go. His absence would be remarked—create further problems. Damn …

And yet … He savoured his decision. Problem-solving through other channels. Business by means of—

David Winterborne smiled, feeling himself looking back towards a rock ledge he had traversed; a high fence he had hurdled with ease

PART ONE

Machines and shadows

CHAPTER ONE

Business Arrangements

‘Look, Major—’ The FBI agent employed his former rank without respect, as if it was a shrivelled fruit bitter on his tongue. ‘It’s in your own interest to cooperate with the Bureau …’

There were two of them in the small apartment’s main room. Fall sunlight exposed the age of the carpet, the weary furniture. If he craned his neck, he would catch a glimpse of the Washington Monument in the distance, narrow and sharp as a missile against the faded blue of the sky.

‘I know nothing about Alan Vance or his business deals,’ he replied for perhaps the fourth or fifth time. Mid-morning traffic three floors below the window protested like animals caught in quicksand with the squeal of horns and brakes.

‘For Christ’s sake, Major, you were married to his daughter until a couple of years ago!’ It was spoken by the senior of the two, his back to the room, his face in half-profile irritated, squinting into the light as if it challenged him. ‘What d’you mean, you know nothing? You were family, Major!’

They were short-tempered with frustration, with a kind of righteousness. It was entirely probable that his former father-in-law was as crooked as they came, and their investigation overdue. Vance in trouble with the federal authorities amused him—however much he resisted being drawn back, even at such a tangent, into the morass that his brief marriage had become. The FBI men threatened to reawaken painful memories. He squinted towards the window.

‘I wasn’t family, McIntyre—never family.’

The younger of the two, seated opposite him in a narrow armchair that seemed designed more for interrogation than comfort, appeared embarrassed. McIntyre remained at the window, his features set in a grimace that expressed a determination to disbelieve. Then he turned to him.

‘For Christ’s sake, you don’t owe the guy a free beer, Major! Why cover for him now?’ He came closer, wafting ahead of him the scent of a masculine aftershave and tobacco. And moral outrage. He stood before the sofa, hands clenched at his sides. ‘We’re going to get Vance, Major—for bribery, tax evasion, corruptly obtaining government funding—the works. I don’t see how you can refuse to help us with your record.’

‘My record?’ he mocked, sensing himself smaller, more compact than the man who bulked over him, the soft hair above his collar haloed by the sunlight.

‘Desert Storm, Major—you were there. Instructor on Stealth Fighters, you even flew missions. Your other work for the Company, your air force record …’ His effort suggested there had to be some button he could push that would activate the human being he confronted.

‘Trying to wrap me in Old Glory won’t do it,’ he remarked, angering McIntyre. The younger man’s bland, pale features extinguished the beginnings of a smile.

McIntyre turned on his heel.

‘What the hell is it with you, Gant?’ he snapped. ‘Your file says you’re an asshole. I believe the file!’

‘Your privilege, McIntyre. I told you, I know nothing about Vance’s aircraft company. I flew his company jet; I married his daughter. I left his company; I left his daughter.’ With a deliberateness that was designed to anger, he glanced at his watch. I’m late for work, McIntyre—you through with me?’

‘Not by a long way, Gant—not by a long way,’ McIntyre threatened.

‘What happened to Major? It kind of dropped out of sight—’

‘Why are you siding with a guy who screwed up your job and your marriage, Gant? Tell me what you owe him.’

‘Nothing you’d understand, McIntyre.’ He realised he was leaning forward tensely in the chair, in some vague, reminiscent form imitating the posture of someone refusing to answer an interrogator. His Vietnamese interrogators, KGB questioners … it was of no significance which memory was evoked. It was important only that he was once more confronting the world as something pitted against him, antagonistic and dangerous. ‘I don’t owe him anything—I just don’t know anything.’

McIntyre was leaning forward as he stood, large hands clasping his thighs like a footballer paused for a set play.

‘The Senate Committee is going to call him to give evidence. We already got a great deal of data against Vance. Don’t be a hick from Iowa all your life, Gant. Wise up. Help us … It ought to be your duty as a Federal employee, for Christ’s sake—!’ His exasperation was entire, consuming. That helped. ‘This guy,’ McIntyre continued, his arm wildly addressing the younger man while he continued to stare with a baffled rage at Gant, ‘let me tell you about this guy, Chris. This hero dropped out of high school—this hero demonstrated against the war in Vietnam, in Iowa, for Christ’s sake, then he went there himself! He was arrested at the age of fourteen for one of those Peace March things—all that Kennedy crap.’ Gant made a noise that was almost a growl, and McIntyre battened on the small betrayal of emotion, grinning. ‘Maybe the guy didn’t know—living out in the boondocks—that Jack and Bobby were both dead. Chris, whose surname he had forgotten, looked at him as if watching a father or uncle being humiliated.

‘Jack and Bobby,’ McIntyre continued, ‘neither of them could keep their pissers in their pants, not even on Inauguration Day. Jack and Bobby …’ He sighed theatrically. ‘Your hero here is just a fucking liberal, like them. And a pain in the ass ever since.’ Gant remained immobile, passive in his chair. ‘That Camelot bullshit—eh, Gant? Haven’t you wised up yet?’

Eventually, into a silence that seemed hot and tense, Gant said: ‘What for? To look at the world through your eyes, McIntyre? I’d rather be dead.’

‘Jack and Bobby and Camelot screwed up your life, Gant. Go get yourself another one.’

‘So you can put it all on file?’

He stared at Chris. The young man wore the suit of a junk-bond dealer and just happened to be a federal agent. He seemed already without hope and possessed of nothing but a shallow ambition; and perhaps a fragile, incompetent decency. One day, he’d wake up to find he’d become McIntyre. Gant sighed audibly and shook his head. Then he said:

‘You’ve got all of me on the computer file, McIntyre. Why don’t you just add a statement I never made? For the sake of neatness?’

‘Vance is a damn crook, Gant—!’

‘Whoever got arrested in the land of the free just for that?’ He stood up, surprising them. ‘I’m late, McIntyre. Go bother some of those assholes with fifty assault rifles and ten thousand rounds of ammo who think they’re defending life, liberty, the American way and Mom’s apple pie—I don’t need this. I can’t help you—’

McIntyre snorted.

‘Can’t help—or won’t help?’

Chris hovered by the window like a repo man who had discovered his belongings valueless and the condition of the apartment embarrassing. Perhaps, as McIntyre had claimed, Chris thought of him as some kind of legend who could only disappoint in the flesh. Suddenly, he was angry with them both. They had brought his recent past back into the room and it had spilt on the carpet like paint, staining it. He had walked out on Alan Vance and Barbara. Left that part of his life behind. The sense of failure, even of shame, that he had felt at the breakdown of his marriage had been reawakened. He’d spent two years trying to bury it.

‘You’re in trouble, Gant—’

‘I hear you.’

‘It’s a long time since you were a hero—untouchable.’

‘Sure. I hear you playing the music, McIntyre—I just can’t dance.’

‘You will, Gant, you will. Two left feet and all. For the Senate Committee. I promise.’ He glowered at Chris. ‘Let’s get out of here—I need some fresh air.’

‘It’s in short supply in this town, McIntyre—and I’m more used to an oxygen mask than you.’ For the first time, he smiled. ‘Don’t believe his version of anything, Chris,’ he added to the startled younger man. ‘Especially life. McIntyre doesn’t know anything about real life—’

‘Says you—’

McIntyre confronted him for a moment, then his expression became dismissive. Gant turned away, knowing he had made another enemy. But then, people like McIntyre only ever wanted to screw you. Petty power never did have much sense of humour.

‘See you, McIntyre,’ he offered ironically. ‘Soon.’

The door of the room closed behind them, then the front door slammed. At once, Gant wanted to get out of his apartment, as if it might make some move to restrain him, begin the interrogation of memory again. He’d tried to forget the failed marriage and Alan Vance, and make the quarrel a personal one between himself and McIntyre. He could deal with that.

He put on the jacket and tie to which he had long become accustomed, picked up his briefcase, locked the door behind him and headed for the office. Had he lived, Jack Kennedy would be almost eighty now, and people would remember him with the cold clarity of the familiar, the ordinary; the half-failed rather than half-completed. Like McIntyre remembered him. Mitchell Gant closed his mind on the thought.

Tim Burton had spent the previous evening and night at Alan Vance’s desert home outside Phoenix, in the shadow of the Superstition Mountains. It was a place as unlike his London home or the surroundings of his Cotswold mansion as he could ever have imagined—white walls heated only by the splashes of Indian rugs and woven blankets, by Mexican artifacts and reddish-ochre tiles, and hard-edged modern furniture. It was only one of Vance’s homes—and not a home at all in the sense that Cardleigh Manor or Holland Park were his homes.

There had been mane-tossing, half-wild horses near his bedroom window in the first heat of the morning, and the unexpected strips of grass gleamed after the ministrations of arching sprays of water.

He had nevertheless felt comfortable, embraced by the stark ranch-style house bathed by the high desert air and in the shadow of sharp, grey mountains where miners had died following illusions of gold. Now, squinting at the gleaming aircraft at the end of the desert runway—a distant speck, like a stranded gull in the morning heat haze—the high air tickled his agoraphobia; however mildly, he resented the mood of exposure because it tainted what was to be savoured—the tide of his expectations. He was eager, he realised—as eager as he had been at the very beginning of Artemis, his company, when the only aircraft they had had were two old, hired Boeings with which to take on British Airways and the Americans.

As eager, he realised, as he had been at the very beginning of everything, when the figures on the balance sheets had proclaimed that he had made his first million. This—well, that really, that at the end of the runway, still unmoving—was another beginning. The first of his order of six of Vance’s aircraft waited to begin its pre-delivery flight—waited to begin his revenge.

The flight crew were to rehearse the press flight while they tested the systems. When they returned, reporters and cameramen would be loaded aboard and flown on a sightseeing, publicity-serving junket, awash with champagne and knee-deep with caviar and canapes, over the Grand Canyon and back to Phoenix. Maximum exposure, locally, nationally, internationally, for Artemis Airlines and Vance Aircraft. Sounds good to me, he thought, suppressing a satisfied, anticipatory smile.

Cameras fussed around them. Vance, inexpressive. behind sunglasses, had summoned the media as if by magic—they had come to see the man being investigated by the Senate and the man who had always been the maverick of the US plane-makers, the dazzling, flawed boy whose firm jaw was now padded with the jowls of success and power. Beside Vance, his daughter Barbara, Executive V-P in charge of Corporate Affairs at Vance Aircraft, was darkly power-suited against the mood and heat of the morning. Burton tensed as he saw the plane straighten, and the cameras turned towards it as to a new bird seen in an unexpected place. The tension was palpable. The low hangars and factory buildings were crouched around them under the desert sky, which diminished the aircraft, and made it more fragile as it began to accelerate. The Vance 494 airliner was no more than a distorted, shimmering image as it rushed towards them through the heat. Burton felt Vance’s hand on his arm, but with a questioning touch. Momentary loss of nerve? Success was as important to Vance as to himself … His daughter’s features seemed varnished with a glossy anxiety. Other company people were in suits and overalls, or dresses that attempted competition with the hard sunlight. In his own concentrated anxiety, he had forgotten how many people there were, arranged as for an American funeral or graduation ceremony on white chairs in neat rows in front of the hangar from which the airliner had been rolled out an hour earlier. Local politicians and dignitaries, businessmen, faces that habitually adorned the Arizona social and charitable functions and glossy magazines. The delivery of the first of Burton’s six ordered planes was important to Arizona, to the whole south-west sunbelt.

The employees and executives had moved into what might have been a protective fence around himself and Vance.

A plume of dust billowed out behind the accelerating plane and its noise was beginning to cannon back at them from the mountains. It was a projectile being fired down the runway. Burton felt his mouth dry and his hands grip at themselves, holding certainty in a fierce grip or suffocating doubt. Then the gleaming metal bullet sailed … moving effortlessly into its natural element above the desert and the roiling dust. A great silver insect against the mountains, then against the sky like a star. There was clapping, but the reflected, magnified engine noise drowned it.

As the noise diminished, he heard Vance’s chuckle of celebration and relief. Barbara held the big man’s arm. His jaw was firmer, younger again, and his blue eyes glinted challengingly as he removed his sunglasses. The cameras whirled around them once more like seductive dancers, and Vance was answering the reporters’ questions about bribes and misappropriated funds. His manner was confidently dismissive. Burton moved to his other side and shook his hand for the photographers. Above them, high above, the plane circled slowly, a distant, winking speck. Burton’s mood was elated, but fierce as a weapon. After all the dirty tricks, the attempts of the big national carriers to keep him out of Heathrow, JFK, O’Hare, Europe’s international airports—after the vast bank loans, the rescheduling of debts as regularly as bowel movements—this was a real beginning.

It had been exhilarating, climbing the mountain against their hostile weather. Then his own country’s national carrier, privatised but anticipating monopoly, had attempted to steal passengers, spread black propaganda, question his liquidity, the safety of the huge loans. They’d settled out of court, eventually, but their actions had declared that now it was a dirty war. One he had taken on with a ruthless alacrity that had surprised him.

Now, with the 494 in service within six months, regularly flying the Atlantic, he would undercut all competition.

He pumped Vance’s hand, perhaps his sudden exhilaration surprising the American. Then Vance slapped his shoulder—they slapped each other’s shoulders in their released, gratified nervousness; brothers under the suits. Vance had begun in overalls, as he had in bright, even lurid sweaters and with much longer hair. Now, neither of them could be stopped.

‘Let’s get a drink!’ Vance bawled, his arms embracing the cameras, the guests, his small desert kingdom. ‘Or drunk! Come on, Tim-boy—it’s our day!’

His enthusiasm was tumultuous, enveloping. He dragged Burton to his side like a lover, his arm on his shoulder, and steered him towards the hospitality marquee, its gaudy, flounced sides flapping in the desert breeze.

Vance had begun designing and building executive jets, rich toys for richer boys. Then he’d copied the Boeing philosophy, stretching and fattening the fuselage until he had the skeleton of the 494. A long-haul workhorse on to which he had bolted the two big Pratt & Whitney engines he had helped design, some fancy avionics he’d bought in and his own design for the fuel management system—and the airliner possessed a better load-to-range ratio than any of its rivals. It was the most effective and cheapest transatlantic carrier in existence. Burton knew that as certainly as did Vance …

… but the people wouldn’t buy it. Not yet. They were waiting patiently in their lightweight suits and silk ties in their boardrooms for him to be their guinea pig. The big carriers would flock to Vance and stand in admiration with the desert dust blowing over their polished shoes and squinting against the sun—once his airline, Artemis, had shown how good and cheap the 494 was. Until then, they would stick with their Airbuses and their Boeings. So, Vance needed him like an addict—just as he needed Vance. He smiled reassuringly as they approached the marquee. He could hear the canvas cracking in the breeze like old wood. Fuck the rules, don’t tell me about them … It could have been a pledge between them. Bankers patted Vance on the back as his smile preceded them into the marquee’s illusory cool. Local politicians seemed lit by his confident flame.

The 494’s two big engines had faded into the distance beyond Phoenix. Thanks, Alan, he thought. Oh, thank you, Alan … He had been given the means to shaft the European and British carriers who had tried, for a decade, to ensure his failure.

Barbara Gant—or did she call herself Barbara Vance Gant now? No, he remembered, she had remarried and there was a child … She, too, was smiling, glad-handing. He was given a glass of chilled champagne and raised it to her. She returned the salute with a quiet triumph.

‘Of course—a wonderful aircraft,’ he offered in reply to someone in a light-grey suit with the distinguished grey coiffure of an American banker—or mafioso. ‘Local employment?’ He remembered. The state senator. ‘Employment will be no problem—’ he grinned. ‘Give me six months on the New York route and they’ll be flocking here, Senator. I guarantee!’ His confidence embarrassed him, his habitual reserve reminding him of its right to his smiles, his manner. ‘I won’t let the plane down,’ he could not avoid adding with a laugh. ‘Next spring, at the latest, they’ll be falling over themselves to buy Alan’s baby!’

He moved further into the undergrowth of the crowded marquee, among species he had forced himself to be able to confront and confound. Vance was without that English apologetic tic in the forebrain which moderated self-congratulation. His arms waved above his head in broad, unquestioning gestures. The moneymen, the politicians, the executives, the advisers—all of them were people from whom he had masked himself behind his money and his most trusted deputies, even behind his dazzling wife. His long hair, his sweaters, his apparent naivety; all had been defences against intrusion, bolsters of an assurance he found it difficult to maintain. He sipped more champagne.

Bright chatter, then, or amusing asides. He sensed his path through this forest of money, influence and dependence in the role they forced upon him—St George, riding to Vance’s rescue. The sound Englishman. It must be the pepper-and-salt in his hair that gave him the appearance of maturity over Vance, since the American was ten years older than himself. His hands, too, began to wave, like those of Vance; smaller, politer imitations. The marquee became hot with bodies and success. The mingling of expensive perfumes and aftershaves was heady. He clipped his glass to the plate on which a helping of salmon and salad had arrived, unrequested. He pecked at the food, his excitement unable to digest. Nodding as he listened to a Phoenix matron inviting him to her salon.

‘A great shame,’ he murmured, ‘but I’ll be back in London before Thursday … Of course, on my next visit. Delighted!’

The matron floated away, having tamed if not captured him. He smiled after her. Charlotte was definitely required on his next visit, if he was to trawl the Phoenix social world … He must ring her and the boys, tell them the plane had flown and he would be home a day early. What time was it in London? He glanced at his watch surreptitiously. Seven hours’ difference, was it…? It was time for tea or G-and-T in Holland Park. He grinned a private pleasure and glanced towards the entrance of the marquee. The desert seemed to smoke with heat rather than dust—

—Vance? Alan Vance was outside, and a man in shirtsleeves was gesticulating in what might have been anger … No, the anger—the baffled fury—was all Vance’s. Smiling, nodding, sidling, Burton moved towards the gap of desert between the canvas and flounces. Voices caught at him like gentle hands, but he managed to evade them. Vance’s features were thunderous with knowledge and rage.

‘What is it—Alan? What is it?’

Vance turned to him, his eyes like those of something dangerous, cornered and wounded, but far from finished. Something that wanted to hurt, damage.

‘What is it?’ he repeated inadequately.

‘The ‘ my plane … it’s gone down. Crashed. The crew’s not answering. It’s gone down, Tim. My plane crashed—’

The image of Her Majesty stepping from the fuselage of the Skyliner into a hot, tropical light and a breeze that ruffled cotton dresses and unsecured hats became that of the newsreader, then the symbolic portcullis of the House of Commons as the channel returned to its coverage of a Commons Select Committee. At once, Giles Pyott sat forward in his armchair, to Aubrey’s renewed amusement. He sighed with gentle mockery and Pyott, swilling the clinking ice in his glass of gin and tonic, acknowledged the noise with an inclination of his head.

The Chairman of the European Affairs Select Committee was an MP known to both himself and Giles Pyott. He had been an unsuccessful Foreign Office junior minister and later had spent an equally fruitless sojourn at MoD. In the former post he had buckled before Aubrey, in the latter had been implacably opposed by Giles. But he was rabidly pro-European, of the party of government, and his present eminence was thus fully accounted. Seated next to him was Giles’ daughter, his shining girl as only Aubrey, Clive Winterborne and Giles himself were ever allowed to call her. In riposte, they were still to her, even in their collective dotage, the three musketeers. As the sound of her voice was faded up—her first words making her father chuckle with indulgent approval, as if he were witnessing some kind of successful training exercise for a violent assault by special forces—Marian was haranguing the man giving evidence to the Committee; the CEO of Aerospace UK, Sir Bryan Coulthard. He appeared sullenly resentful, despite the media coaching he must have had over the years and especially just prior to this appearance on the box.

Money, Aubrey thought—it was always money. A tropical storm of it, running down the drains of the European Union, disappearing into the sands of corruption, grandiose dreams, bureaucracy. In his retirement, he had found a lofty, indulgent aloofness. Giles, because his daughter was angry at waste, incompetence, corruption—and Europe—was angry in his turn. He sipped with a quiet, satisfied savagery at his drink as the industrial knight inadequately fended off the redoubtable Marian.

Aubrey recollected the bloated, gleaming fuselage of the Skyliner from which the monarch was disembarking on the news film. British Airways had two of them, employed for junkets, tourist trips, celebrating Lottery winners and the like. The costs of production had escalated—become mountainous—and the airlines jibbed at buying what was yet another pompous, Louis Quatorze-like dream of European glory by France and the UK with the full complicity of the European Commission in Brussels. Indeed, it was a dream more like those of Brussels than his own country—for Aerospace UK it had been born of desperation at the end of the Cold War … and it was too damned expensive for anyone to buy, this future of airline travel, as it was usually touted. Even Her Majesty’s endorsement on her State Visits would hardly recommend it to realistic, hard-headed airline chairmen around the world.

‘Your shining girl’s fishing,’ he murmured, glancing into his malt whisky and catching a scent of the beef Mrs Grey was preparing for his dinner with Giles. ‘She’s bluffing.’

‘Ah, Kenneth—but Coulthard doesn’t know that,’ Pyott replied in triumph. No one was as clever as his girl, no one quicker on their feet than his only daughter.

Outside, home-going traffic was muted and the sunlight lay strongly on Regent’s Park. Aubrey stirred comfortably in his armchair, enjoying the restrained interrogation.

‘Why won’t they buy his dream, Giles—that Skyliner thing? Cost alone?’

‘Probably. Ludicrous situation,’ Pyott barked. ‘As far as I can understand it—’

‘This is Marian ‘s view, is it, to which I’m to be treated?’ Giles Pyott snorted with laughter.

‘A hit—I do confess as much … yet, it is. It’s the old sad story of overcapacity in the industry and falling revenues. They want cheap, as she puts it, not flashy.’

‘But they won’t buy American planes either.’

‘They’ll have to start replacing their fleets soon ‘ and it’s either American or it’s this costly bugger. Brothel with wings, Marian calls it.’ Aubrey laughed. ‘But Coulthard and the Frogs are sweating over Marian’s acquaintance, Tim Burton, and his choice of plane. That is cheap relatively … HMG and the French have poured so much money into developing the damned Skyliner they won’t bail out the airlines with subsidies to buy it!’

‘Then we have another Concorde on our hands.’

‘With this difference—BA was the national carrier back then and government could make them buy Concorde. Now they’re in the private sector, they think they’ve done enough by taking two on appro and flying the champagne and gold-medallion set on junkets.’ Pyott tossed his head, still thickly crowned with grey hair. His aquiline profile appeared bleak in expression. Full-face, Giles found it harder to frown effectively. The retired soldier gestured at the screen, absorbed in his daughter’s casual, intent duel with Coulthard.

Aubrey had heard as much in the whispering gallery of the Club, and elsewhere where he still encountered men of present or resigned power. The Skyliner was a luxury, ocean-going liner of the air, a grandiloquent gesture appropriate to a more extravagant age. It was opulently appointed, it attempted to carry too many passengers, its engines were inefficient by comparison with the newest generation of propulsion units, its sumptuousness ruined its payload-to-range-to-price equation. It was an overdraft, negative equity, a spendthrift gesture quite out of tenor with the straitened times.

If one airline bought it, then others might. But the Germans had never joined the project, using the money they had saved on Eurodefender to help efface the cost of rebuilding the industrial horror of the former East Germany. Bonn would never allow Lufthansa to acquire a fleet of Skyliners for the US and Far East routes. Air France couldn’t afford it and the Elysée wouldn’t afford it on behalf of the national carrier. The Belgians couldn’t even dream of it, like the Dutch, and the British privatised national airline was not prepared to make more than a gesture. If young Tim Burton succeeded, the Skyliner was sunk without trace … which was what infuriated Marian so much, the billions of Ecus the project had cost. Aubrey shook his head.

‘You can

Reviews for A Different War

[armysparkey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Avery good thriller some parts seemed a little odd as if you needed to know the charictures in advance to understand their motivation but on the whole the book gave you the feeling that you were seeing a new kind of war one with casualties on each side